At First The Mongols Met With No Great Success, And The Kins, Encouraged By A Momentary Gleam Of Victory, Ventured To Reject The Terms Offered By Ogotai And To Insult His Envoy.

The only important fighting during the years 1230-31 occurred round Fongsian, which after a long siege surrendered to Antchar, and when the campaign closed the Kins presented a bold front to the Mongols and still hoped to retain their power and dominions.

In 1232 the Mongols increased their armies in the field, and attacked the Kins from two sides. Ogotai led the main force against Honan, while Tuli, marching through Shensi into Szchuen, assailed them on their western flank. The difficulties encountered by Tuli on this march, when he had to make his own roads, were such that he entered the Kin territories with a much reduced and exhausted army. The Kin forces gained some advantage over it, but by either a feigned or a forced retreat, Tuli succeeded in baffling their pursuit, and in effecting a junction with his brother Ogotai, who had met with better fortune. Tuli destroyed everything along his line of march, and his massacres and sacks revived the worst traditions of Mongol ferocity. In these straits the Kins endeavored to flood the country round their capital, to which the Mongols had now advanced, but the Mongols fell upon the workmen while engaged in the task, and slew ten thousand of them. When the main Kin army accepted battle before the town of Yuchow, it was signally defeated, with the loss of three of its principal generals, and Ninkiassu fled from Kaifong to a place more removed from the scene of war. The garrison and townspeople of Kaifong - an immense city with walls thirty-six miles in circumference, and a population during the siege, it is said, of one million four hundred thousand families, or nearly seven million people - offered a stubborn resistance to the Mongols, who intrusted the conduct of the attack to Subutai, the most daring of all their commanders. The Mongols employed their most formidable engines, catapults hurling immense stones, and mortars ejecting explosives and combustibles, but twelve months elapsed before the walls were shattered and the courage and provisions of the defenders exhausted. Then Kaifong surrendered at discretion, and Subutai wished to massacre the whole of the population. But fortunately for the Chinese, Yeliu Chutsai was a more humane and a more influential general, and under his advice Ogotai rejected the cruel proposal.

At this moment, when it seemed impossible for fate to have any worse experience in store for the unfortunate Kins, their old enemies, the Sungs, wishing to give them the _coup de grace_, declared war upon them, and placed a large army in the field under their best general, Mongkong, of whom more will be heard. The relics of the Kin army, under their sovereign Ninkiassu, took shelter in Tsaichau, where they were closely besieged by the Mongols on one side and the Sungs on the other. Driven thus into a corner, the Kins fought with the courage of despair and long held out against the combined efforts of their enemies. At last Ninkiassu saw that the struggle could not be prolonged, and he prepared himself to end his life and career in a manner worthy of the race from which he sprang. When the enemy broke into the city, and he heard the stormers at the gate of his palace, he retired to an upper chamber and set fire to the building. Many of his generals, and even of his soldiers, followed his example, preferring to end their existence rather than to add to the triumph of their Mongol and Sung opponents. Thus came to an end in 1234 the famous dynasty of the Kins, who under nine emperors had ruled Northern China for one hundred and eighteen years, and whose power and military capacity may best be gauged by the fact that without a single ally they held out against the all-powerful Mongols for more than a quarter of a century. Ninkiassu, the last of their rulers, was not able to sustain the burden of their authority, but he at least showed himself equal to ending it in a worthy and appropriately dramatic manner.

The folly of the Sungs had completed the discomfiture of the Kins, and had brought to their own borders the terrible peril which had beset every other state in Asia, and which had in almost every case entailed destruction. How could the Sungs expect to avoid the same fate, or to propitiate the most implacable and insatiable of conquering races? They had done this to a large extent with their eyes open. More than once in the early stages of the struggle the Kin rulers had sent envoys to beg their alliance, and to warn them that if they did not help in keeping out the Mongols, their time would come to be assailed and to share in the common ruin. But Ningtsong did not pay heed to the warning, and scarcely concealed his gratification at the misfortunes of his old opponents. The nearer the Mongols came, and the worse the plight to which the Kins were reduced, the more did he rejoice. He forgave Tuli the violation of Sung territory, necessary for his flank attack on Honan, and when the knell of the Kins sounded at the fall of Kaifong, he hastened to help in striking the final blow at them, and to participate, as he hoped, in the distribution of the plunder. By this time Litsong had succeeded his cousin Ningtsong as ruler of the Sungs, and it is said that he received from Tsaichau the armor and personal spoils of Ninkiassu, which he had the satisfaction of offering up in the temple of his ancestors. But when he requested the Mongols to comply with the more important part of the convention, by which the Sung forces had joined the Mongols before Tsaichau, and to evacuate the province of Honan, he experienced a rude awakening from his dream that the overthrow of the Kins would redound to his advantage, and he soon realized what value the Mongols attached to his alliance.

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Words from 33591 to 34624 of 191255